John Weeks

About John Weeks

A provocative and entertaining speaker, Weeks helps leaders understand how they can manage themselves to lead others more effectively and to have a positive and intentional impact on the culture in their part of their organization.

In his book, Unpopular Culture and in his writing in the Harvard Business Review and Financial Times, Weeks explains how, as leaders, we nudge culture every day—what people say and do when they think we are not looking—whether we mean to or not. As we get more senior, we are on stage all the time and the spotlight gets brighter. We are a role-models, for better or worse, even when we don’t want to be. The essence of leadership is being your best self more often to have a consistent, insistent and persistent influence on the culture you want to create.

Weeks is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD. Before joining IMD in 2007, he spent 11 years at INSEAD (France), where he was nominated three times as “Best Teacher.” An American who has lived on three continents, he served on the Board of Directors of LEO Pharma and he has worked with clients in Europe, the Americas and Asia such as:

ABB, Actelion, Aggreko, Alcatel-Lucent, AXA, BAT, Grosvenor, Group SEB, Firmenich, Hempel, Holcim, Iberdrola, Imerys, KPMG, Kone, LafargeHolcim, LDC, LEGO, Maersk, Mars, Mazda, Neste, Nestlé, Nokia, Novartis, Orion, Pon, PwC, SABIC, STADA, Tenaris, Tetra Pak and WWF.

He is co-director of the High Performance Leadership (HPL) Program, an intense six day IMD program for experienced senior leaders.

With a background in technology and training as an organizational ethnographer, Weeks holds a PhD in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management (USA), an MPhil in Management from Oxford University (UK) and a BA in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley (USA).

His work has been published in Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, Academy of Management Review and Organization Studies. His book, Unpopular Culture, received rave reviews from The Financial Times, The Economist, BBC Radio 4, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Times Higher Education Supplement, The Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CIO Magazine, Business Digest (France), as well as American Journal of Sociology, Administrative Science Quarterly, Contemporary Sociology, and Work and Occupations.